How It Unfolded
A true-to-life account from the field, anonymised to protect our client. Scroll through the journey.
The collector's question
A district collector reviewing Jal Jeevan Mission progress asked scheme operators a plain question: which villages actually received their 55 litres per person yesterday? Nobody could answer with evidence.
Functionality on paper was near perfect. Functionality in the last village was a different story, told by women still walking to distant wells.
Overflow at the head, dry taps at the tail
Our survey teams found overhead tanks at head-end villages overflowing for hours while tail-end tanks never filled. Pump operators, responsible for sites 40 kilometres apart, ran pumps by habit and hearsay.
Diesel and electricity logs were filled from memory. Nobody was cheating deliberately; the system simply ran on guesswork.
Solar telemetry for every tank and pump
We fitted solar-powered telemetry units on overhead tanks, pump houses and key valves: level, flow, pressure and pump status, transmitted over 4G and LoRa from places where grid power is a rumour.
Local youth from the villages were trained and certified as scheme technicians. Pumping schedules were rebuilt around measured demand, with tail-end villages sequenced first.
The tail end gets water first
Within one season, tail-end villages were receiving scheduled supply on 98 percent of days, verified by tank-level data rather than testimony. Overflow losses fell sharply, and pumping energy per kilolitre dropped 15 percent.
The collector's review meetings now open with a live dashboard instead of a stack of registers.
A scheme the village can see
Tank levels for every village are visible to panchayat members on their phones. Disputes about who got water have been replaced by data everyone shares. The model now covers village schemes across multiple districts.
55 LPCD is not a slogan on a wall. It is a number we measure every single day.